Jury in Georgia Trump Inquiry Recommended Multiple Indictments, Forewoman Says

A special grand jury that investigated election interference by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies in Georgia recommended indictments for multiple people on a range of charges in its final report, most of which remains sealed, the forewoman of the jury said on Tuesday.

“It is not a short list,” the forewoman, Emily Kohrs, said in an interview.

Ms. Kohrs, 30, declined to name the people recommended for indictment, since the judge handling the case decided to keep those details secret when he made public a few sections of the report last week. But seven sections that are still under wraps deal with indictment recommendations, Ms. Kohrs said.

Special grand juries in Georgia do not have indictment powers. Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., has led the investigation and will decide what charges to bring before a regular grand jury.

Asked whether the jurors had recommended indicting Mr. Trump, Ms. Kohrs would not answer directly but said: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science.” In the slim portions of the report that were released last week, the jurors said they saw possible evidence of perjury by “one or more” witnesses who testified before them.

“It is not going to be some giant plot twist,” she added. “You probably have a fair idea of what may be in there. I’m trying very hard to say that delicately.”

The investigation in Atlanta has been seen as one of the most significant legal threats to Mr. Trump as he begins another run for the presidency. In November, the Justice Department named a special counsel, Jack Smith, to oversee two Trump-related criminal investigations. And last month, the Manhattan district attorney’s office began presenting evidence to a grand jury on whether Mr. Trump paid hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months.

A focal point of the Atlanta inquiry is a call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2, 2021, to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he pressed Mr. Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to recalculate the results and “find” 11,780 votes, or enough to overturn his loss in the state.

“We definitely started with the first phone call, the call to Secretary Raffensperger that was so publicized,” said Ms. Kohrs, who was first identified by The Associated Press earlier in the day and told the outlet that some witnesses had arrived at the courthouse with immunity deals already in place.

But the call was not the only turn of events after the 2020 election that came under the special grand jury’s scrutiny. Another was Mr. Trump’s direct involvement in recruiting a slate of bogus presidential electors, a plan that played out in Georgia even after President Biden prevailed in three different counts of the vote.

“We definitely talked about the alternate electors a fair amount, they were absolutely part of the discussion,” Ms. Kohrs said. “How could they not be?”

The jury also looked into hearings before state lawmakers in December 2020, orchestrated by Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, at which Mr. Giuliani and others advanced a number of falsehoods about the election. Mr. Giuliani is among nearly 20 people known to have been named targets of Ms. Willis’s investigation; so is David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party.

“We talked a lot about December and things that happened in the Georgia legislature,” Ms. Kohrs said.

The special grand jury was discharged last month. Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, who is handling the case, has not barred the jurors from talking to reporters, but has sought to limit what they discuss — in particular when it comes to describing their deliberations. Ms. Kohrs is the first of the 23 jurors, and an additional three alternates, to speak out.

The jury heard evidence from June to December in a courthouse in downtown Atlanta and heard testimony from 75 witnesses, including Mr. Giuliani; Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff; and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, as well as a number of election experts. Mr. Trump was not among the witnesses, and his lawyers have said that he did nothing wrong.

Ms. Kohrs said that specific names were not even emphasized to jurors at the beginning, though it became clear fairly quickly what the investigation was about.

“Of course I came home and my mom was like, ‘Is it the Trump thing?’” she said.

At first, Ms. Kohrs said, “we talked a lot about the bare bones of the concept of vote fraud in Georgia,” hearing from various experts and exploring the finer points of how the state’s voting machines work.

“We found unanimously that there was no evidence of vote fraud in Fulton County in the 2020 election,” Ms. Kohrs said. “We wanted to make sure we put that in, because somehow that’s still a question.”

Ms. Kohrs said she was between jobs, after helping make masks during the pandemic, when she received a grand jury summons last year. Even though she didn’t vote in 2020, she said she was “insanely excited” about serving on the jury, adding, “This is one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me.”

She could tell that not everyone on the jury felt the same way. “It seemed like everybody else was not initially happy about eight months of jury duty,” she said, and so she volunteered to be the forewoman.

Among the things that surprised her in listening to the testimony, including from a number of officials from the Trump administration, was “how much people curse in the White House.”

As forewoman, she got to swear in each of the witnesses who came through, including her state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp.

“It was really cool,” she said. “I got 60 seconds of eye contact with everyone who came in the room. You can tell a lot about people in that 60 seconds.”

When she asked David Ralston, the former Georgia House speaker who died in November, if he swore to tell the truth during his testimony last July, he told her “it was the first time in 60 years he had said ‘I do’ to a woman,” Ms. Kohrs said.

Noting that she was 11 when the Sept. 11 attacks happened, Ms. Kohrs said that “Rudy Giuliani is almost like a myth figure in my head, so I’m already intimidated.” She said she made a point of shaking his hand when his testimony was finished.

Last week, after Judge McBurney released a few portions of the special grand jury report, Mr. Trump declared it a “total exoneration” on Truth Social. His legal team declined to comment on Tuesday but has previously said that “there were no violations of the law by President Trump.”

Ms. Kohrs made clear that while many serious topics were discussed, there was sometimes lighter conversation between the jurors and witnesses. When Senator Graham testified during the week of Thanksgiving, Ms. Kohrs asked him whether it was too early in the year for her to wear a Santa hat.

His response, she said: “Absolutely not.”